This news item is from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis.
Researchers at UCL’s Institute of Education and the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis have collaborated with Anthony Wall, BBC Arena film director and Series Editor (1978–2018), to create a new interactive digital map that explores the histories and cultures of London through sequences taken from the documentary strand’s 700 films. Over the past decade, Anthony has engaged with several innovative projects that reconfigure the Arena archive and explore its further creative potential.
Timed to coincide with Arena’s recent 50th anniversary, the initiative brings together archival material, location‑based stories and newly recorded interviews to offer unique insights into the programme’s contribution to the city’s cultural landscape.
From its beginnings in 1975, Arena’s filmic essays pioneered a new form of documentary to become the most influential and innovative arts programme ever made for television. Its many international awards bear testimony to the unique impact of the strand with its themes framed by the extraordinary pace of the UK’s revolutions in cultural identity over the past century.
Alongside established figures such as T.S. Eliot, Luciano Pavarotti, Samuel Beckett and Orson Welles, Arena generated the first serious TV examinations of lesser-recognised subjects such as Bob Marley, Poly Styrene, Soweto Theatre, Cindy Sherman and Bill Shankly. These were augmented by films concerned with material culture, such as The Private Life of the Ford Cortina, the Chelsea Hotel, Desert Island Discs and the many interpretations of the song, “My Way.”
Today's ethical currency, which is characterised by a newly acute discourse on race, gender, sexuality, nation, migration, faith and identity, has been the ethical discourse of Arena throughout. Together, Arena's 700 films can perhaps be seen to comprise an alternative history of the modern world.
The digital map has been developed using Memory Mapper, an open‑source platform created by CASA researchers to support community storytelling and the mapping of place‑based histories. Visitors to the site can explore locations across London through the unique lens of Arena’s films and its production history. They will encounter a geo-historical filmic expression of the past 120 years across the city, tying together places with cultural figures.
A key feature of the project is a series of exclusive new interviews with Anthony Wall and selected programme directors, who reflect on the making of the programme and its relationship with the city. These encounters provide behind‑the‑scenes insights into the London’s cultural life over several decades.
The project’s Principle Investigator, Dr Michael Hrebeniak (Institute of Education, UCL), who is currently researching a book for the BFI on programme, says:
Arena opened the horizons of the world to me as a teenager in the 1980s and it’s been an immense privilege to collaborate with Anthony Wall and the long-term programme editor, Emma Matthews, on selecting the film clips and exploring the circumstances behind their making. Through making this data newly available in imaginative ways, the map will enable the public and researchers alike to explore Arena's unique archival and narrative histories of London and create new spatial associations.
The Arena London map will aim to make this wealth of material publicly accessible and searchable, and will stand as a prototype for developing the creative potential of an archive of unparalleled international significance.
In digitally reinstating vanished biographical habitats through the supposedly ephemeral medium of TV, the project also responds to UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, wherein history extends to representation through situated human practices and performances.
The project additionally forms part of UCL’s wider research into digital heritage, public history and participatory mapping. By pairing archival material with contemporary reflections, the map offers a layered account of London’s cultural identity and invites users to engage with the city’s history in new ways.
We created Memory Mapper for recording and communicating the relationships between culture and place. We are therefore hugely excited to have the opportunity to use the software to explore the history of Arena and its engagement with the spaces and peoples of London.
The project has been supported by the AHRC Knowledge Exchange scheme. The map will continue to expand beyond London as further archival material and interviews are added, creating a growing resource for researchers, students and the wider public.
Read more
Explore the latest news from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
More news